Janet Fitch's Blog, page 4

Franzen at ALOUD in Los Angeles

Just saw Jonathan Franzen speak in Los Angeles, thought I'd write it up for those of you unable to make it... Memorable and, yes, inspiring.

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10 Writing Tips that Can Help Almost Anyone

For all you brave souls who've decided to do some writing this summer, I've boiled down the best things I know about writing and put them up on my blog.

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Wish you lots of inspiration, and have a great summer!

Janet

LA Times Festival of Books--the Godzilla of Book Fests

Hi all--
Went to the the granddaddy of all book festivals, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Hundreds of authors, booths, books, readings, panels... was there from Saturday morning to the last panel Sunday afternoon, picked out the best stuff, like a kid sorting Halloween candy. New blog!

www.janetfitchwrites.wordpress.com

wishing you great summer reading!
Janet F.

LA Times Book Prizes: Dave Eggers and Innovation

Hi All--
Anyone who knows me knows that two things I love best are books and new ideas--so the LA Times Festival of Books is the perfect storm. At the opening of the Festival, the LA Times Book Prizes are announced, and Dave Eggers won a new prize for Innovation. Lots of thinking about this one.

check out new blog post at: www.janetfitchwrites.wordpress.com

best,
Janet

WHICH IS THE BEST GRAHAM GREENE NOVEL?

I'm having an internal argument/discussion as to which is the very best Graham Greene novel. Which do you think is the best--and what's the criteria you used in deciding "best?" Favorite? most re-read? Most powerful?

For instance, my favorite Greene is The Comedians. I like the setting (Haiti) the politics, the affair, the tremendously creepy political mood and how landscape reinforces it. Reread it every couple of years.

However, the one that just seared into my soul, the one that kept me from being able to even go about my daily life, was The Power and the Glory, the one set during the anti-religious persecutions of the Mexican Revolution. I've never reread it, it hit me so hard.

So I have to say
The Power and the Glory.

Marisa Silver's new short story collection Alone With You

Good god can Marisa Silver write!! I just saw her read at Skylight Books in LA--she read an entire story from the new collection Alone With You . So good you want to jump off a cliff or something. She read an entire story and I don't think I took ONE breath.

Weekly short short stories at janetfitchwrites.wordpress.com

I've created a sort of head-kitchen at janetfitchwrites.wordpress.com... where I'm going to be writing an exclusive short short every week, as well as commenting on books, music, art, writing exercises as well as (probably) an occasional rant. Stop by... if you want to be notified about new short stories, or the progress of my new novel, tentatively entitled Marina Makarova (you can tell by my reading, it's set during the Russian Revolution in Petrograd), sign up for e-mail updates.
and good reading!
Janet F.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Time time time... I have the flu, which is the perfect condition in which to read 700 page book about a tuberculosis sanitarium. It changes your sense of time to read a book like this, to yield yourself up to the experience described. What does it mean to have time, to fill time, to experience time as short or long. I am rereading this book, and enjoying all my college-day marginalia--find it hugely preferable to reading books annotated by random anonymous people... Everything fascinating is already highlighted, margins full of insights I did not recall nor would have thought of now.

Like the basic idea right now of tedium, and why a vacation is more restful than just lying around. "habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course. We are aware that the intercalation of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of times, strengthen, retard and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself."

But if it goes too long, and you start to feel at home, "As one 'gets used to the place', a gradual shrinkage makes itself felt. He who clings, or better expressed, wishes to cling to life, will shudder to see how the days grow light and lighter, how they scurry by like dead leaves, until the last week, of some four, perhaps is uncannily fugitive and fleet.'

Only page 110 now... it's a long climb up the Magic Mountain!+++++

+++++Now on page 336, continuing the climb,... currently hit a plateau with all the UNTRANSLATED french in the Walpurgisnicht chapter... where Hans Castorp finally chatting up the obsessively attractive Russian patient Frau Chauchat... IN FRENCH. Oh God, why didn't they translate the French in the older editions? It's like Tolstoy. They translate the German and the Russian, but assume EVERYONE speaks French. Good god. Limping along with Babelfish, but going to have to just ambush a francophone friend to finish it off...

That said, what isn't in this book? You don't know whether you're bored or fascinated--mostly both... So many ideas! Our hero goes from being a very conventional young man who didn't think about much besides his evening cigar, to begin to consider the great questions, not only of that age, but any age: What is life? What is the nature of matter? What is disease and health? Ideas about classicism and republicanism and conservatism and spirituality... considered at very great length, I might add.

This is not a book, it's a relationship, a conversation with one of the greatest minds of our time, who can be incredibly boring and long-winded and yet you come away with your head stuffed with new, exciting ideas. And what subtle understanding of human nature! But gawd... gotta keep moving or I'll never make it.

++++P. 440was horribly sick and didn't want to read this, it all seemed like it was coming true.

+++p 520 Feel like I've made it over the crest. The famous SNOW chapter very beautiful.. now we're back in the land of the windbags again... the Jesuit one vs. the freethinker rationalist...
++++ DONE.
The finest of fine toothed combs run over all of Western civilization. The ongoing debate between the classical humanist and the absolutist Jesuit was the longest boxing match in history, evenly matched and yet rarely really connecting. Yet the later chapters, Chauchat and Peeperkorn, and what happens to Castorp's good-soldier cousin Joachim, the surprising mystic episode, made it worth staying into the 18th and 19th rounds.
As was the case with Anna Karenina, I could have done with less philosophizing. yet this is what spurred him, like Tolstoy, to write his book--can't have your cake without your broccoli. Very glad I did it.

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Russia in the Shadows, HG Wells

Russia in the Shadows by H.G. Wells


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
H.G. Wells visited Russia (Petrograd and Moscow) in the fall of 1920, a tremendously bleak time, and his overall impressions, delivered in six installments, were interesting--especially if you know the players-- and measured, but, as he says himself, he was not a particularly curious man. His sense of the Bolshevik Government is I think apt, and his take on Marx's beard is hilarious.

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Katish: Our Russian Cook

Katish: Our Russian Cook by Wanda Frolov


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Charming but souffle light... not quite MFK Fisher in early '20s Los Angeles, but like the intersection of family story, Russian emigre tale and recipe book.

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Katish: Our Russian Cook